George W. Owen, a Friend of LBJ's Mistress

Madeleine Brown has often been criticized for her claim that she first met Lyndon Johnson, the love of her life, at a victory celebration party in Dallas  around the first week of October, approximately three weeks before the official party at the Driskill Hotel in Austin on October 29, 1948. 

Barr McClellan, in his book,
confirms that LBJ was involved in litigation in the court of Judge T. Whitfield Davidson in the Dallas area at about that time frame. In the days when Texas was a one-party (Democrat) state, the November election was a mere formality; the political wrangling took place in the primary and run-off elections. LBJ's opponent in the 1948 Democratic run-off, Coke Stevenson, filed a lawsuit to prevent Johnson's name from appearing on the ballot for the November election. From the documentation below, one can easily infer that Johnson was in Texas for the litigation until he first appeared back at his Congressional desk in Washington, D.C. on October 11, 1948.

 In Blood, Money and Power (at page 94), McClellan writes:

"Johnson had a team of lawyers representing him in federal district court before Judge Whitfield. One was John Cofer, who would become Clark's attorney for all criminal matters. Angry at the order allowing masters to take further evidence, the legal team contacted Abe Fortas, an old friend and later Supreme Court judge, who happened to be at a conference in Dallas. Fortas made an illegal, off-the-record telephone call, to check with his former mentor, Justice Hugo Black of the United States Supreme Court. In that brief conversation, Fortas made certain Black would rule in Johnson's favor."

LBJ's having FDR's old fixer, Tommy the Cork, in his corner of course didn't hurt.

David B. Perry, alleged researcher into the JFK assassination, concluded on his website that the party where Madeleine Brown claimed she met Lyndon Johnson could not have occurred in Dallas three weeks prior to October 29. His logic was faulty, based as it was on the assumption that Coke Stevenson and Dan Moody did not concede defeat until October 12. 

But LBJ knew by September 29, when Justice Black ruled in his favor, and the state court refused to take jurisdiction of the matter, that he had won; he didn't need to wait for Stevenson to tell him it was party time.

The rest of what Dave Perry says is just as easily discounted.  He asks: "Would Johnson actually know in advance that voting problems in Jim Wells County would be called the 'Box 13' scandal and would he really want to celebrate this budding predicament with a gala at the Driskill on the 29^th?"

Hell, yes he would. That's what made it even more fun for a man like LBJ, who sought power through secret connections and maneuvers. One of Johnson's lawyers, Donald B. Thomas, had been sent to the Valley by his law partner Ed Clark to take care of just that anticipated situation--and with enough cash to buy as many votes as necessary.

Barr McClellan tells us the initial vote count was accurate, showing that Johnson had lost. Three days after the polls had closed, while votes were still being counted, 

"Thomas added the fraudulent votes Johnson needed to win. Realizing the simple necessity for additional votes, he made up voters and added their names to the poll list and then to the ballot count."   -- Blood, Money and Power, p. 83.

THE CORSICANA (TEXAS) DAILY SUN,
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 1948:

Dan Moody, attorney for Coke Stevenson, said at Austin today that Stevenson would appeal to the U. S. Supreme Court in his hot fight against Lyndon Johnson for Democratic nomination to the U.S. Senate. Moody, a former Texas governor, said Stevenson intends to file a motion in the U. S. Supreme Court asking that an unfavorable order by Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black be set aside. Black last Tuesday stayed an injunction issued by Federal Judge T. Whitfield Davidson which had prevented the name of Johnson from going on the general election ballot as the Democratic party nominee. The effect of Black's ruling was to allow Johnson's name to go on the ballot and to halt an Investigation of alleged vote fraud which Judge Davidson had launched in three South Texas counties, Duval, Jim Wells and Zapata. Commenting on Black's ruling, Judge Davidson said in Dallas today:

"The U. S. Supreme Court has altered my opinion, but it hasn't changed my mind."

The little gray-haired jurist said "There is nothing further I can do in the case. I must observe the ruling of a higher court."

... Asked what, if anything, he could do about the findings, the jurist said: "Nothing."

The ruling by Justice Black found that the federal district court had no jurisdiction in the case. Davidson, commenting on this, said that It had been the contention of Johnson's attorneys that the U. S. Senate was the proper place for the election tangle to be unraveled....

"This is not true," said Judge Davidson. "The senate can act in such cases only where there has been a general election. There has not been a general election in this case—only an election to determine a party nominee. No one has yet stood for election to the U. S. senate. Johnson and Stevenson only sought the Democratic party nomination." Therefore, the only thing the senate could do would be to declare, after the general election, that Johnson could not have a seat in the senate and this would not do Stevenson any good....

Johnson yesterday was certified by Secretary of State Paul B. Brown as the Democratic nominee. The State Democratic Convention had certified Johnson as the winner by 87 votes. Stevenson's appeal would be to the full supreme court. It meets next Monday.

Federal commissioners appointed by Davidson were ordered yesterday by the jurist to stop their investigations, just as the hearings were yielding some interesting developments. Out of 10 Jim Wells county ballot boxes opened over the bitter protests of Johnson's attorneys, one was empty. A precinct 13 box containing poll lists and tally sheets for the precinct was missing. It was this Precinct 13 that had occupied a prominent spot in Stevenson's application to Judge Davidson for an injunction, Stevenson had claimed that 200 votes were added to this box after the Aug. 28 second primary. It was his contention that vote frauds in the three counties had deprived him of a constitutional right to be the Democratic nominee.... The Supreme court must first grant permission for filing of the action, before it can pass directly on the mandamus petition. If it rejects the motion, that would have the effect of killing the suit.

Votes had been for sale in South Texas for many years, and Johnson, having worked in that Congressional District for Richard Kleberg, knew how it could be done. All that he needed was cold-blooded attorneys with no principles. He found that in Ed Clark and Donald Thomas. The only mistake they made was in revealing the secret scheme to their law partner, Barr McClellan, who had a sense of ethics and morality. The violence that was so commonplace in the South Texas lifestyle in those days has been further described in "What Can We Learn from Madeleine Duncan Brown?"

Madeleine Brown was relatively old by the time she began telling what she knew about the man she loved, about how he wielded power and had people killed without blinking an eye. Like all of us, her memory would have faded and been supplemented with a little creative writing. However, it's important to verify and document what she told us as much as possible because there are other statements she made that relate to events after Lyndon Johnson left office.

The most significant statement could possibly be about the meeting she described that took place at Murchison's house. Dave Perry says she always said the party took place at the home of Clint Murchison, Sr., but what she actually said is: "I attended a social at Clint Murchison's home. It was my understanding that the event was scheduled as a tribute honoring his long time friend, J. Edgar Hoover, whom Murchison had first met decades earlier through President William Howard Taft..." It is not clear whether those were her words or those of her ghostwriter, but the book does not specify that it was Murchison, Sr., although the description could not have applied to the younger Clint.

This description appears an article styled "Johnson's illegitimate Son":

When asked what time Johnson came in, Madeline said:

Well he came from Houston. It must have been 11:00 o'clock. The party was breaking up at that time. And it shocked everyone that he came in. Of course, I was thrilled to see him. Normally, I knew his agenda when he was in Texas, but that night, I did not know that he was coming. And they all went in to this conference room.

It gets a little bizarre when Madeline says, "He (George Owens) was there socially, and of course, Jack Ruby had brought one of the call girls to the meeting." When asked about the call girl, Madeline said, "Her name was Shirley. I know her, but she doesn't want to talk about this." Maybe, she's married now, and maybe, one day she will also tell her story.

When asked who picked up Nixon, Madeline said, "Nixon was already in town. He came in on Tuesday and met with Lyndon that no one knew anything about. But Lyndon met Nixon in Dallas on Tuesday."

What is most important in my opinion about what she has revealed about that social event is the fact that this man named George W. Owen (whom she calls Owens) was there. 

In a 2001 conversation she had on another occasion--an interview with John Delane Williams and Gary Severson--she revealed more information about Owen:

JDW: Now, the Murchison party. One of the things, I don't know that you ever heard this, but, what is his name, Brown, Walt Brown. One of things he's said is that everything we've heard about the Murchison party has come from you. And no one else  who was at the party has said anything.

MB: Gary Barker has come forth, I think. Galen Ross [sic], are you familiar with his new book?

JDW: Galen Ross?
[Note: This book is by Robert Gaylon Ross, Sr.]

MB: Some of them I'm not familiar with. But George Owens that worked for Clint Murchison. [Note from QJ: Owen worked for Clint JUNIOR, who owned the Cowboys team, not for Clint SENIOR.] He [Owen] passed away not long ago, and I've known George . . . George went to . . . we didn't have the DFW airport back then [1963]. Dallas only had about 450,000 people. He went out to the Bluebird [sic] Airport and George was going on camera to tell the story of what happened. And do you know the day we had that all set up he died suddenly. I mean a bunch of this . . . sometimes I feel bad.

***
GS:  Did you know of any family background of Mac Wallace?

MB: Well, I told him [George Owens?], one of our neighbors is Carl Wallace, and Carl and George Owens, who said he picked up Hoover out here at the airport, were close friends, and if George would have lived long enough, I might have got more information, you know, but this Carl Wallace's father owned the Wallace Plumbing Company here in Dallas, and the Wallace Plumbing Company was in Dealey Plaza that day, I don't know if John had.

GS: That was my next question.

MB:  Well anyway, not too long ago, I talked to Carl. He comes by once in a while with his little dog. And I said "Carl, what happened to your mother and father?" And he said, "My dad killed himself," and I wanted to say, when did he kill himself? and eventually, I want to know, why did he kill himself? Knowing what I know about the story, and the background, Big Time.

GS: Could the plumbing company be Wallace-Beard?

MB: I couldn't tell you.

GS: There is some evidence the truck in Dealey Plaza that day was Wallace and Beard.

***
GS: It's so mind-boggling.

MB: You know, I told you about this neighbor, Carl Wallace. He told me enough that in my mind, I keep thinking, George Owens died instantly, you know. What is the connection, really. Why would a man, a prosperous businessman in Dallas, Texas kill himself? You can't help but wonder.

~~~~~~~~

When Madeleine told us George Owens worked for Murchison, she would have been talking about George Washington Owen, Jr., who went to SMU on a basketball scholarship and later became a scout for the Dallas Cowboys. The team was mostly owned by Clint Murchison, Jr., except for a small percentage owned by Bedford Wynne.

We first meet George Owen through Texas Monthly's prolific writer, Gary Cartwright whose writing actually dates back in Texas journalism before TM magazine was created:

Mad Dog may have been founded in Mexico, and flourished in Austin, but its roots can be traced all the way back to Dallas, 1963, when [Bud] Shrake and Cartwright were noted young sportswriters for The Dallas Morning News who didn't think that sports were the most important thing in the universe. "Our apartment had become a late-night hangout for musicians, strippers, and other nocturnal creatures," Cartwright recalls in "1963: My Most Unforgettable Year," an essay in his recently published collection of articles, Turn Out the Lights: Chronicles of Texas During the 80s and 90s.

"One of our regular drop-bys was George Owen, manager of the University Club, a former SMU basketball player who had dated the fabulous Candy Barr before the Dallas power structure [Pat Gannaway] sent her away on a phony marijuana charge.

Two other regular visitors were Jack Ruby, the cheesy little hood who owned the
Carousel Club, and Jada, an exotic stripper. ... Her act consisted mainly of hunching a tiger skin rug while making wildly orgasmic sounds with her throat."

So George Owen managed the University Club? 

FBI reports reflect the address of George Owen’s University Club to have been 1413-1/2 Commerce, one block on the other side of the Carousel. 

Gary Cartwright also wrote the following article, using George Owen as his confidential source, in 1976:

Taking the wrapper off a Texas legend

by Gary Cartwright   

December 1976

The "Quintessence of Morality"

Juanita Dale Slusher encountered the joy of sex at age five with the aid and comfort of an eighteen-year-old neighbor named Ernest. She remembers that he was gentle, and not at all unpleasant. It wasn’t until she encountered the Dallas police force some years later that Juanita Dale associated sex with guilt.

When she was nine her mother died and her father remarried: Doc Slusher, brick mason and handyman, a whiskey-drinking harmonica player and all-around rowdy, already had five kids, and right away there were four more, then two more after that. With all those Slushers around, you’d think the work would get done, but it never seemed to…. 

At age thirteen and painfully confused, Juanita Dale took her baby-sitting money and grabbed a bus out of Edna, an independent decision that would become socially acceptable, even laudable, to future generations, but an act worse than rebellion in those days: it was the act of a bad girl. For a while she lived with an older sister in Oklahoma City, then a year or so later moved to live with another sister in Dallas. The Dallas sister soon hooked up with a man, and Juanita Dale was on her own…. 

To be technically correct, it was the old Liquor Control Board (LCB) that first discovered the girl who would become Candy Barr. They discovered her posing as an eighteen-year-old cocktail waitress—the minimum legal age. She wouldn’t be eighteen for another four years, but girls from tough backgrounds develop early, or they don’t develop at all. She kept changing jobs, and the LCB kept discovering her. Once they sent her home to Edna, but she caught the next bus back to Dallas…. 

Candy’s first husband, Billy Debbs, was a graduate of Shorty’s academy. Billy was a good lover but a poor student. He went to the pen, got out, then got shot to death. Somewhere in there—she can’t fix the exact time—a pimp

spotted her jitterbugging in a joint called the Round-Up Club and launched Candy’s movie career. She must have been about fifteen when Smart Aleck was filmed. The thousands (perhaps millions) who have seen this American classic will recall that she was a brunette then.  

Smart Aleck was America’s first blue movie, the Deep Throat of its era, only infinitely more erotic and less pretentious. It was just straight old motel room sex; the audience supplied its own sounds….

One of the fringe benefits of being in films was that Candy got invited to all the best stag parties. Several prominent and wealthy Dallas business and professional men, on my oath that their names would not be revealed, recalled a Junior Chamber of Commerce stag where Candy was the star attraction. One auto dealer told me, “She went for two hundred, three hundred, even five hundred bucks. There was a banker who paid five hundred every time he put a hand on Candy.” … 

The Colony was the Stork Club of Dallas, the Cocoanut Grove, the butterfly of the Commerce Street neon patch where Jack Ruby ran the sleazy Carousel and conventioneers intermingled with cops and hustlers and drug merchants.

…Nobody in the Dallas Police Department wanted to talk about a marijuana case from twenty years ago, and Pat Gannaway, who retired a few years ago to join the Texas Criminal Justice Division, wasn’t available for an interview. But I know this: Pat Gannaway spent a lot of man-hours bringing one stripper to justice. The confluence of these two forces—Candy Barr, desecrater of all that is decent, and Pat Gannaway, the terrible swift sword—is surely the quintessence of a morality frozen in time. 

Captain Pat Gannaway was referred to in newspaper accounts of the time as “Mr. Narcotics.” As a lad he had been so eager to join the Dallas Police Department that he lied about his age. For twelve years, until he was kicked upstairs (he was put in charge of rearranging the Property Room) in the 1968 department shake-up, he ran the special services bureau as his private fiefdom. He reported only to the chief. “His passion,” reporter James Ewell wrote in the Dallas Morning News on the occasion of Gannaway’s retirement, “was police work, down on the streets with his men.” 

He loved the Army, too. He served in Army intelligence and was an expert wiretapper. When he wasn’t swooping down on the vermin that afflicted his city, Gannaway and his entire force were making speeches to civic clubs, warning of the peril. Those recent 1000-year sentences that made Dallas juries such a novelty may have been the direct result of Pat Gannaway’s tireless crusade. Gannaway told James Ewell: “It was always a good feeling to see someone on those juries you recalled being at one of those talks. We always told our audiences if you got rid of an addict or pusher, you were also getting rid of a burglar, a thief, or a robber.”

In the autumn of 1957 Gannaway assigned Red Souter (now an assistant chief) and another of his agents, Harvey Totten (now retired), to rent an apartment near Candy Barr’s apartment and establish surveillance. A telephone repairman would testify later that he discovered a “jumper tie-up” connecting Candy’s telephone to the telephone in the apartment occupied by Souter and Totten, but the jury either ignored this or didn’t believe it. A few days after the surveillance began, Candy received a visit from a friend, a stripper named Helen Kay Smith, who laid out a story about her mother coming to visit and asked Candy Barr to hide her stash — the Alka-Seltzer bottle of marijuana. Candy agreed and slipped the bottle inside her bra, next to her big heart. 

Two hours later, as Candy was talking on the telephone to a gentleman friend (and therefore obviously at home, in case anyone with a search warrant wanted to drop in), there was a knock at the door. Candy’s defense attorneys claimed the search warrant was a blank that Gannaway filled in after the arrest, but the court didn’t buy that either.

Candy’s gentleman friend, who asked to not be identified, told me what happened next:  “Candy said hold on, someone is knocking at the door. I heard some noises and someone hung up the phone. All I could think of was she’s in some kind of trouble. I got over to her place. When I walked in I saw Gannaway, Totten, Red Souter, Jack Revill, and I think one other narcotics officer.

 

Gannaway picked up a chair and said something like, ‘Well, well, that looks like a joint on the floor.’ I swear to you, it was the first marijuana cigarette I ever saw. That’s when Candy, God bless her, said to Gannaway, ‘He’s just a square john kid. He doesn’t know anything about this. If you let him go, I’ll give you what you came for.’ She reached in and pulled out the bottle. 

Gannaway decided he would take me in anyway, and that’s when Jack Revill said, ‘Captain, if you do that, I’m turning in my badge.’ So they took her away.”

So it appears from this article of Gary Cartright's that George W. Owen ("Candy's gentleman friend, who asked to not be identified") owed a big-time debt to both Revill and Gannaway--two vice detectives on the scene on November 22, 1963 in Dallas!

The Cartwright article continues:

Candy’s four-day trial the following February was a farce, which didn’t prevent it from also being a sensation. In its year-end review the Dallas Morning News headline read: Candy’s Trial Led ‘58 Scene. Judge Joe B. Brown, who would later make his mark as the buffoon judge in the Jack Ruby trial, borrowed a camera and during one of the recesses snapped pictures of “the shapely defendant.” Defense attorneys Bill Braecklein and Lester May realized from the beginning that their problem was much larger than a bottle of marijuana, although, as May explained, “In those days marijuana was worse than cancer.”

“It was a time when the pendulum had swung far to the right,” May told me. “If the police decided you were guilty of something, they made a case and you were found guilty. It was just that simple. Candy’s real crime was she wouldn’t cooperate with the vice squad.”

No, the real problem wasn’t the marijuana, it was Candy Barr herself. It wasn’t merely her reputation, though God knows that was strong enough to kill a rogue elephant, it was that combative stubbornness, that unwillingness to throw herself at the feet of the jury and beg forgiveness. Chief prosecutor James Allen offered her two years for a guilty plea, and if Les May hadn’t got her out of the room she would have spit in his eye, or worse.

They decided not to put her on the stand; without her testimony, of course, it would be almost impossible to challenge state witnesses: she was in possession of marijuana, regardless of Helen Kay Smith’s testimony. That mysterious cigarette on the floor, though, was something else entirely. The attorneys worked out a way to let Candy make a statement to the jury without actually testifying, which meant that she could not be cross-examined. No one remembers Candy’s exact words, but it must have been a stirring oration. When she had finished, the jury just retired and voted her fifteen years in the Big Rodeo. It was Valentine’s day 1958.

“She was a very naive young lady,” Braecklein recalled. “While we were waiting to come to trial, she was out in Las Vegas, doing her act. Just one week before we came to trial, I got word that she was going to be a bridesmaid in Sammy Davis, Jr.’s wedding [to a white actress]. Anyone who grew up in Texas knew …

Although they didn’t anticipate anything approaching fifteen years, the defense team had braced itself for a verdict of guilty. They had already drafted a list of reversible errors that would have choked the Star Chamber. The real shock came when they lost a 2—1 decision in the State Court of Criminal Appeals. In the eleven months that separated the trial from the appeals verdict, Candy had reinforced her public image by moving in with hoodlum Mickey Cohen: one assumes justice is blind, but just how blind is an open question.

Mobster Mickey Cohen

… I offered her one of my cigarettes and asked about Mickey Cohen. Cohen had personally guaranteed her $15,000 bond while the marijuana appeal ran its course. In a cruel way, those were the peak years for Candy Barr. She lived in a villa in the notorious Garden of Allah on Sunset Boulevard in L.A. and earned up to $2000 a week stripping there and in Vegas. Simultaneously, a pack of lawmen and profiteers howled like hungry dogs in her shadow—FBI agents, CIA agents, treasury agents, IRS agents, L.A. cops, Vegas cops, Dallas cops. The pressure was so enormous that the El Rancho Vegas had her replaced with Nelson Eddy. She was also in and out of the hospital with hepatitis. Candy recalled that the first time she ever heard of Mickey Cohen was when he sent an orchid in a champagne glass to her hospital room in L.A., along with this note: “Don’t worry, little girl, you got a friend.”

I had heard from good sources that the reason that Cohen got rid of Candy was she was giving him a bad press. The vast majority of those agents were interested in Mickey Cohen, not his girl friend. Word came down from “the Eastern organization” that if Cohen didn’t drop Candy, they would. Somewhere between Catalina Island and Hawaii….

Nixon and the ITT Scandal of 1972

Sosthenes Behn and International Telephone

During the administration of Richard Nixon, one of the worst scandals to arise prior to Watergate was that involving the merger between International Telephone and Telegraph Co. and the Hartford Insurance Co. ITT had been founded by a man from an island purchased by the U.S. and renamed the Virgin Islands, thus making him an American citizen. He had considerable interests in Cuba, as well as Spain, and his outlook was in favor with that of Germany during the Nazi regime, as shown below in an excerpt from author Anthony Sutton, Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler. 

Peter Flanigan was caught up in the middle of the flap over I.T.T. just at the time John Mitchell resigned as Attorney General to take over the re-election of Nixon at CREEP headquarters.

From Chapter Five of Anthony Sutton, Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler:

The multi-national giant International Telephone and Telegraph (I.T.T.)1 was founded in 1920 by Virgin Islands-born entrepreneur Sosthenes Behn....In 1930 Behn acquired the German holding company of Standard Elekrizitäts A.G., controlled by I.T.T. (62.0 percent of the voting stock), A.E.G. (81.1 percent of the voting stock) and Felton and Guilleaume (six percent of the voting stock). In this deal Standard acquired two German manufacturing plants and a majority stock interest in Telefonfabrik Berliner A.G.I.T.T. also obtained the Standard subsidiaries in Germany, Ferdinand Schuchardt Berliner Fernsprech-und Telegraphenwerk A,G., as well as Mix and Genest in Berlin, and Suddeutsche Apparate Fabrik G,m.b.H. in Nuremburg.

It is interesting to note in passing that while Sosthenes Behn's I.T.T. controlled telephone companies and manufacturing plants in Germany, the cable traffic between the U.S. and Germany was under the control of Deutsch-Atlantische Telegraphengesellschaft (the German Atlantic Cable Company). This firm, together with the Commercial Cable Company and Western Union Telegraph Company, had a monopoly in transatlantic U.S.-German cable communications.

W.A. Harriman and Company took over a block of 625,000 shares in Deutsch-Atlantische in 1925, and the firm's board of directors included an unusual array of characters, many of whom we have met elsewhere. It included, for example, H. F. Albert, the German espionage agent in the United States in World War I; Franklin D. Roosevelt's former business associate yon Berenberg-Gossler; and Dr. Cuno, a former German chancellor of the 1923 inflationary era. I.T.T. in the United States was represented on the board by yon Guilleaume and Max Warburg of the Warburg banking family.

Baron Kurt von Schroder and the I.T.T.

There is no record that I.T.T. made direct payments to Hitler before the Nazi grab for power in 1933. On the other hand, numerous payments were made to Heinrich Himmler in the late 1930s and in World War II itself through I.T.T. German subsidiaries. The first meeting between Hitler and I.T.T. officials — so far as we know — was reported in August 1933,³ when Sosthenes Behn and I.T.T. German representative Henry Manne met with Hitler in Berchesgaden. Subsequently, Behn made contact with the Keppler circle (see Chapter Nine) and, through Keppler's influence, Nazi Baron Kurt von Schröder became the guardian of I.T.T. interests in Germany. Schröder acted as the conduit for I.T.T. money funneled to Heinrich Himmler's S.S. organization in 1944, while World War II was in progress, and the United states was at war with Germany.⁴

Through Kurt Schröder, Behn and his I.T.T. gained access to the profitable German armaments industry and bought substantial interest in German armaments firms, including Focke-Wolfe aircraft. These armaments operations made handsome profits, which could have been repatriated to the United States parent company. But they were reinvested in German rearmament. This reinvestment of profits in German armament firms suggests that Wall Street claims it was innocent of wrongdoing in German rearmament — and indeed did not even know of Hitler's intentions — are fraudulent. Specifically, I.T.T. purchase of a substantial interest in Focke-Wolfe meant, as Anthony Sampson has pointed out, that I.T.T. was producing German planes used to kill Americans and their allies — and it made excellent profits out of the enterprise.

In Kurt von Schröder, I.T.T. had access to the very heart of the Nazi power elite. Who was Schröder? Baron Kurt von Schröder was born in Hamburg in 1889 into an old, established German banking family. An earlier member of the Schröder family moved to London, changed his name to Schroder (without the dierisis) and organized the banking firm of J. Henry Schroder in London and J. Henry Schroder Banking Corporation in New York. Kurt von Schröder also became a partner in the private Cologne Bankhaus, J. H. Stein and Company, founded in the late eighteenth century. Both Schröder and Stein had been promoters, in company with French financiers, of the 1919 German separatist movement which attempted to split the rich Rhineland away from Germany and its troubles. In this escapade prominent Rhineland industrialists met at J. H. Stein's house on January 7, 1919 and a few months later organized a meeting, with Stein as chairman, to develop public support for the separatist movement. The 1919 action failed. The group tried again in 1923 and spearheaded another movement to break the Rhineland away from Germany to come under the protection of France. This attempt also failed. Kurt yon Schrader then linked up with Hitler and the early Nazis, and as in the 1919 and 1923 Rhineland separatist movements, Schröder represented and worked for German industrialists and armaments manufacturers.

In exchange for financial and industrial support arranged by yon Schrader, he later gained political prestige. Immediately after the Nazis gained power in 1933 Schrader became the German representative at the Bank for International Settlements, which Quigley calls the apex of the international control system, as well as head of the private bankers group advising the German Reichsbank. Heinrich Himmler appointed Schroder an S.S. Senior Group Leader, and in turn Himmler became a prominent member of Keppler's Circle. (See Chapter Nine.)

In 1938 the Schroder Bank in London became the German financial agent in Great Britain, represented at financial meetings by its Managing Director (and a director of the Bank of England), F.C. Tiarks. By World War II Baron Schrader had in this manner acquired an impressive list of political and banking connections reflecting a widespread influence; it was even reported to the U.S. Kilgore Committee that Schrader was influential enough in 1940 to bring Pierre Laval to power in France....

This was the Schröder who, after 1933, represented Sosthenes Behn of I.T.T. and I.T.T. interests in Nazi Germany. Precisely because Schröder had these excellent political connections with Hitler and the Nazi State, Behn appointed Schröder to the boards of all the I.T.T. German companies: Standard Electrizitatswerke A.G. in Berlin, C. Lorenz A.G. of Berlin, and Mix and Genest A.G. (in which Standard had a 94-percent participation).

In the mid-1930s another link was forged between Wall Street and Schröder, this time through the Rockefellers. In 1936 the underwriting and general securities business handled by J. Henry Schroder Banking Corporation in New York was merged into a new investment banking firm — Schroder, Rockefeller and Company, Inc. at 48 Wall Street. Carlton P. Fuller of Schroder Banking Corporation became president and Avery Rockefeller, son of Percy Rockefeller (brother [sic] of John D. Rockefeller) [Note: Avery was Percy's son; Percy was son of William A. Rockefeller, Jr.-- John D.'s brother, and both he and his brother, William G. Rockefeller, married daughters of James Stillman, founder of the City National Bank of NY--Citigroup] became vice president and director of the new firm. Previously, Avery Rockefeller had been associated behind the scenes with J. Henry Schroder Banking Corporation; the new firm brought him out into the open.7
Westrick, Texaco, and I.T.T.

I.T.T. had yet another conduit to Nazi Germany, through German attorney Dr. Gerhard Westrick. Westrick was one of a select group of Germans who had conducted espionage in the United States during World War I. The group included not only Kurt von Schröder and Westrick but also Franz von Papen — whom we shall meet in company with James Paul Warburg of the Bank of Manhattan in Chapter Ten — and Dr. Heinrich Albert. Albert, supposedly German commercial attache in the U.S. in World War I, was actually in charge of financing yon Papen's espionage program. After World War I Westrick and Albert formed the law firm of Albert and Westrick which specialized in, and profited heavily from, the Wall Street reparations loans. The Albert and Westrick firm handled the German end of the J Henry Schroder Banking loans, while the John Foster Dulles firm of Sullivan and Cromwell in New York handled the U.S. end of the Schroder loans.

Just prior to World War II the Albert-Papen-Westrick espionage operation in the United States began to repeat itself, only this time around the American authorities were more alert. Westrick came to the U.S. in 1940, supposedly as a commercial attache but in fact as Ribbentrop's personal representative. A stream of visitors to the influential Westrick eluded prominent directors of U.S. petroleum and industrial firms, and this brought Westrick to the attention of the FBI.

Westrick at this time became a director of all I.T.T. operations in Germany, in order to protect I.T.T. interests during the expected U.S. involvement in the European war.8 Among his other enterprises Westrick attempted to persuade Henry Ford to cut off supplies to Britain, and the favored treatment given by the Nazis to Ford interests in France suggests that Westrick was partially successful in neutralizing U.S. aid to Britain.

Although Westrick's most important wartime business connection in the United States was with International Telephone and Telegraph, he also represented other U.S. firms, including Underwood Elliott Fisher, owner of the German company Mercedes Buromaschinen A.G.; Eastman Kodak, which had a Kodak subsidiary in Germany; and the International Milk Corporation, with a Hamburg subsidiary. Among Westrick's deals (and the one which received the most publicity) was a contract for Texaco to supply oil to the German Navy, which he arranged with Torkild Rieber, chairman of the board of Texaco Company.

In 1940 Rieber discussed an oil deal with Hermann Goering, and Westrick in the United States worked for Texas Oil Company. His automobile was bought with Texaco funds, and Westrick's driver's license application gave Texaco as his business address. These activities were publicized on August 12, 1940. Rieber subsequently resigned from Texaco and Westrick returned to Germany. Two years later Rieber was chairman of South Carolina Shipbuilding and Dry Docks, supervising construction of more than $10 million of U.S. Navy ships, and a director of the Guggenheim family's Barber Asphalt Corporation and Seaboard Oil Company of Ohio.9. ...In short, during World War II International Telephone and Telegraph was making cash payments to S.S. leader Heinrich Himmler.10 These payments enabled I.T.T. to protect its investment in Focke-Wolfe, an aircraft manufacturing firm producing fighter aircraft used against the United States.

The interrogation of Kurt von Schröder on November 19, 1945 points up the deliberate nature of the close and profitable relationship between Colonel Sosthenes Behn of I.T.T., Westrick, Schröder, and the Nazi war machine during World War II, and that this was a deliberate and knowledgeable relationship....

For footnotes, see Chapter Five, of Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler, by Anthony Sutton.

**********

Peter Flanigan also found himself criticized over one of his aides, a Military Intelligence officer named Jonathan Chapman Rose, who seemed to be avoiding his military service as the Vietnam War raged, spending his days in a cushy job at the White House, assigned to Flanigan's office. Just as Jack Anderson had attacked the Nixon staffers for how they handled ITT, reporters also sniped about what this seemingly healthy attorney was doing instead of dodging bullets in Vietnamese ride paddies. It would turn out that Rose's father had been a high official in Eisenhower's administration, serving as deputy to the Secretary of the Treasury, George Humphrey. Chappie Rose, as he was called, had been an attorney during World War II, handling the same type of termination contracts for the Army that Nixon had handled for the Navy. He was a partner in a law firm founded in Ohio with a branch in Washington, D.C. to handle Rose's former boss' lobbying interests for the Hanna Mining Co., of which Humphrey was the controlling shareholder.

Jonathan C. Rose, Skull and Bones 1963, hid out in Peter Flanigan's office instead of serving in Vietnam, allegedly because of an injured left shoulder. He and Nixon's daughter, Tricia, had a mutual acquaintance in Cleveland.

A plan to opiate the boomer generation

The Third Rail – Part Three

By Kris Millegan

In the statist world in which we live, there is a very real tendency to accept as fact all that the official organs of propaganda emit.                       — Alan Milchman

My father, Lloyd S. Millegan, was associated with American intelligence gathering operations from 1936 until he left the CIA in 1959. On his 18th birthday, in August of 1936 he boarded a ship from Portland, Oregon to spend his sophomore year of college at the University of Shanghai. In August of 1937, he left Shanghai traveling to Vladiviostok to board the Tran-Siberian Railway [important historically because of the money that built it just prior to the Bolshevik takeover in Russia, loan funds negotiated for Morgan Bank by Willard Straight, Whitney son-in-law] and journey across the USSR, and Europe, eventually attending the 1937 Oxford Life and Work Conference, along with John Foster Dulles, before going back to Oregon to finish school.

After college, my father was scheduled for graduate studies in 1939 in Switzerland, but finances and the kindling of WWII, sent him instead to Washington, DC. He was soon working in the basement of the Library of Congress under Archibald MacLeish, first as a research analyst for the Library of Congress, then with the Office of the Coordinator of Information, and finally moving on to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in mid 1942.

Then in August of 1943, my father became involved in what Professor Peter Dale Scott calls “deep politics.” Dad was inducted into the military, given the shortest training available, as a medic, but placed into G-2, and then joined General MacArthur's staff as the personal secretary to Dr. Joseph Hayden, who was MacArthur's Civil Advisor on Philippine Affairs. Part of my father's work was to report back to OSS in Washington about MacArthur and his aide Colonel Willoughby.

Among my father's other duties was working with the Philippine guerrillas. After Dr. Hayden died, my father worked even closer with guerillas. He went into Manila ahead of the American troops to “sequester” the Japanese-puppet governments papers. For that act he was sued by the Japanese government and given the Legion of Merit by the US Army. He had became very friendly with the guerrillas and helped them set up a temporary government.

When MacArthur returned, he found that many of the native Filipino oligarchs (who were his friends) had collaborated with the Japanese and been jailed by the guerrillas, who had actually fought the Japanese. MacArthur proceeded to let his friends out of jail, and soon someone came to replace my father, a Lieutenant Ed Lansdale. My father moved on to do research and analysis for the invasion of Japan, and then his final job in the military was to gather information and write a report on the Japanese use of opium and narcotics before and during WWII. This was a months-long project that including traveling and interviewing many political figures as well as the major opium players in East Asia.

My father then came back to Washington, DC, first to work in the State Department and then the Central Intelligence Agency, where he worked overtly until April of 1951, his last position, serving as Branch Chief, Head of East Asia Analysis Office. He then went into “private business,” setting up Pacific Books, Inc., and taking our whole family with him to Indonesia. After about a year we were back in Fairfax, Virginia, outside DC, where my father “worked” in public relations and advertising sales.

Then in 1956, my father and mother took a 4-month long trip to East Asia. Us kids were told it was to gather information for a book. He never wrote the book. Late in 1957, he was asked to serve as the vice-president of Scarritt College in Nashville, Tennessee. Then, all of a sudden, in 1959, the president of the school quit, my father was asked to serve as president, he said no, and moved the whole family out to Oregon. He went back to college, and soon was teaching junior high school to earn income. I was ten years old, a kid just following his folks around.

Then in the late 1960's my father asked me what I thought of the Vietnam War, and I gave him a flip teen-age answer, “You have some rice paddies, and a sack of hand grenades. You throw the grenades and win the war for the guys in the white hats.” My father said we had to have a talk. Sometime later, in September of 1969, he said it was time to have that talk. By then I was married, had a young daughter, was a partner in a growing record store, and sponsoring rock and roll dances. On Sept, 21, 1969, the day before my 20th birthday, we had that talk.

It was amazing, even though, I had no idea what was being said. My father seemingly had waited until a friend of his, Dr. D.F. Flemming (who was out promoting his new book, The Cold War and its Origins) was in town to participate. My father straight off told me, “The VietNam war is about drugs,” and that there were secret societies involved.

I didn't understand, and since it was the late 1960s, and I had long hair, etc. I deduced my father was having a “drug talk” with me. It all seemed so serious, what with some professor and all. So, I proceeded to sit up straight, and got ready to say, “yes, sir," waiting for my dad to tell me not to smoke dope, etc. But that is not what happened.

My father continued talking about his intelligence career. He explained, how he had first worked with the State Department, when he was an exchange student, then his service in the OSS, being “sheep-dipped” into G2, and being put on MacArthur's staff. They also talked a bunch about the Viet Nam war. They both felt that “they” (the powers that be) were playing out a “lose scenario,” because of the U.S. actions taken so far. They talked about psychological warfare, about how the news wasn't the real news. That the stuff in the news was “sway pieces,” and that when I had been told he was an advertising/PR salesman, my dad was actually helping to put together a daily high-level briefing. That he had left the CIA in 1959, and was talking to me now because of some paper he had signed, that didn't allow he to reveal anything for ten years.

It soon became apparent that I had no frame of reference, and wasn't truly able to comprehend what they were saying. The meeting was over, and I went on with my life.

I had some other conversations, and arguments with my Dad where I learned some other things, but one of the most amazing came after he was gone. Even though I hadn't understood the talks, had inspired me to investigate “CIA-Drugs.” Going through my father's papers after his death in 1990, I found an itinerary for the 1956 trip and noticed that he had traveled to Chiang Mai, Thailand. At that time I was very interested in the history of Chiang Mai, because of the role the city has played in the opium/heroin trade. I had been told that the city had grown to over a million people from a very small town in the 1950s, and was looking for information. Now, I could simply ask my mother.

So the next time I visited my Mother, I asked her about Chiang Mai. She said that, “Yes, it was a small village. The biggest thing in town was the church.” She said she had some pictures in a book up on her bookshelf. I reached up to get the photograph album, and mom made a little aside, “That's when I stopped believing everything I read in the newspaper.”

That pricked up my ears, because I had asked my mother questions before, and she always just brushed them aside, saying she didn't know anything. So, I asked my mom, what did she mean?

She said that in 1956 they had been in Vietnam before going to Thailand, and while in Thailand the newspaper reported on a battle in Viet Nam, right where they had been. She said, “There was no battle, we were having a picnic.”

I turned back the pages of her photo book from Chiang Mai, and there were pictures of my parents, Ed Lansdale and a bunch of soldiers. They were obviously having a picnic.

I borrowed the photo book and photocopied the page. One was a picture of my mother where she was so radiant and vivacious that it was later used during her memorial. Also in that picture you can see Ed Lansdale and others sitting around having a good time – a picnic. The interesting item, is what my mother had written in the margin next to the picture:

“Eudora (my mother's name) out from Saigon with Col. Lansdale and North Vietnamese Military leaders.” North Vietnamese Military leaders? Having a picnic?

Lansdale is the guy sitting with the flattop. And it is in the historical record that he fought fake battles in the Philippines. Could it be that he did something similar in Vietnam? (Fletcher Prouty's JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy has some amazing revelations about Lansdale's mock and fake battles) What else was going on in Viet Nam at that time?

From Gerald Posner's in Warlords of Crime:

French intelligence and the CIA became involved in clandestine activities that would seem far-fetched in a spy novel but that played a major role in making the Triads and the Golden Triangle the greatest factors in the narcotics business. French intelligence dealt in narcotics to bankroll their costly war against Ho Chi Minh. The CIA, obsessed with the perceived cold war threat of monolithic communism, assisted criminal empires on the assumption that they would provide a buffer to postwar Communist expansion. The policies of these intelligence agencies transformed the region into the leading heroin-producing and -smuggling center. The French led the way.

When the French government finally banned opium in Indochina, French intelligence (SDECE) took the trade underground. The French military had decided the best way to fight the North Vietnamese Was to employ tens of thousands of mercenaries in counterinsurgency warfare. But the problem was a lack of funds. The Indochinese war was tremendously unpopular in France and the government provided little money. Senior French intelligence operatives decided expediency outweighed legality and "Operation X" was born.

From 1951 to 1954 the French developed a sophisticated opium distribution network, a feat which won the loyalty of the hill tribes, the population from which the French hoped to recruit their counterinsurgency army. Each spring SDECE operatives bought opium at competitive prices from the hill tribes. Mountain guerrillas then avoided customs and police controls by flying the illegal drugs to a French military school. From there they were taken by truck to Saigon, where they were turned over to a syndicate of river pirates who worked for the SDECE. The river pirates transformed the raw opium into a smokable version in two large Saigon refineries. Then they distributed some to the city's underground dens and sold the substantial excess to Chinese merchants with Triad connections. The river pirates split the enormous profits with French intelligence.

Operation X initially boosted the military efforts with large infusions of money. And the hill tribes rallied to the French cause as long as they received high prices for their opium. But when the SDECE utilized non-highland minorities as middlemen, the hill tribes complained they were being cheated. The French ignored the complaints. As the money to the hill tribes dwindled, so did their support for the French. The intelligence service's opium policy unwittingly helped to end France's role in Indochina. The Meo hill tribes, the backbone of the mercenary army, were so dissatisfied with their opium prices, they allowed the North Vietnamese to infiltrate the surrounding jungles and surprise the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu. Without Meo reinforcements, the French surrendered on May 8, 1954, and signed an armistice two months later.

The entire SDECE opium experience was not lost on the CIA, which monitored the French operation and realized that opium was the key to hill tribe loyalty. In half a dozen years, when the CIA sent agents into the Laotian and Vietnamese hills to organize counterinsurgency armies, they offered the French colonel who created Operation X a senior position. Convinced the CIA would never give him real power, he refused. The SDECE, in financing its Indochina war, made the Southeast Asian narcotics trade international in scope. While some opium was smuggled out of the Golden Triangle before 1950, the sheer bulk restricted the amount exported. But when French intelligence used the air force to move unlimited quantities, they established the foundations for large-scale postwar trafficking. By selling to Chinese merchants with Triad connections, they accelerated a narcotics network that expanded and paralleled the booming Hong Kong Triads.

Although the French signed a 1954 armistice, they merely agreed to withdraw from the northern half of the country and held a nationwide referendum in 1956. The SDECE maintained its partnership with the Saigon river pirates, ensuring immense profits from the opium dens, gambling casinos, and prostitution houses, including the Hall of Mirrors, the largest whorehouse on the globe. The CIA wanted to cancel the referendum since the Communists were likely to win a popular election. The CIA asked French intelligence to abandon its underworld ventures and turn them over to the Americans. The SDECE refused. 

By early 1955 the French mobilized the river pirates and some Corsican mercenaries into a wartime battalion. In April the CIA, together with the South Vietnamese Army, fought a pitched battle with the SDECE forces. It was the first and last time that two Western intelligence agencies entered open combat. [emphasis added] Colonel Lansdale, the CIA chief, directed operations from the presidential palace, while Captain Antoine Savani, the SDECE chief, moved into the river pirates' headquarters. For six days a savage house-to-house battle raged for Saigon.

The river pirates offered a reward to anyone who brought Colonel Lansdale to their headquarters, where they promised to cut open his stomach and stuff him with dirt. There were no takers. The river pirates had grown soft through a decade of vice and corruption, and the CIA forces pushed them back into the Run Sat swamp. The outnumbered Corsicans withdrew. At the battle's end more than 500 were dead, 2,000 wounded, and 20,000 homeless. Ngo Dinh Diem, the Americans' handpicked choice, was in firm control of Saigon's political machinery and its extensive underworld.

During the next fifteen years the United States allowed the South Vietnamese to become deeply involved in the narcotics trade. The chief of the air force, later Premier and Vice President, Nguyen Cao Ky, became a principal smuggler, disguising his trafficking as intelligence and surveillance forays. His brother-in- law ran the Saigon port and oversaw a massive import and export of drugs. South Vietnamese officials worked closely with a Triad based in Saigon's Chinese suburb, Cholon. The Vietnamese used government planes and trucks to transport opium from the Golden Triangle into Saigon. The Cholon Triad negotiated the price with the Chinese growers in the Triangle, refined the narcotic in jungle labs and then distributed it to Vietnam's addicts and sold the excess to large Hong Kong syndicates. During this time Bangkok became a key transshipment point, a role it retains to this day.

U.S. military files are replete with the names of South Vietnamese government leaders who spent more time dealing in narcotics than in fighting Communists. Money poured into a system held together by corruption. But the United States not only overlooked its allies' illegal activities, it also assisted them. The CIA followed the path of French intelligence. When operatives went into the Laotian hills to organize counterinsurgency units, CIA agents assisted the Meos in planning maximum harvests.

Posner does leave some of the story out. He lays the blame for the opium smuggling on our “allies,” and the Triads, and leaves out a major player, Corsican Lucien Conein (who we will see plays a role in later events), but the basic history lesson is correct: The US took over the Golden Triangle opium trade from the French in 1955.

The words my father used were,

“The Viet Nam War is about drugs. There are these secret societies behind it. Communism is all a sham, these same secret societies are behind it. It's all a big game.”

And that “they” were playing out a “lose scenario.”

Later in a discussion/argument he told me that there was a plan to opiate the boomer generation. I didn't understand what he was saying, but I can now comprehend, somewhat, of how he came to those opinions.

So, why would someone have a “picnic” and tell the world they were having a battle?

It is a psychological operation – psy-ops. The action forces people to choose sides, and that's one of the first steps to being manipulated. "They" want you to choose a side, any side, they don't care. Sides can then hardened, and soon there is a “conflict.” Then, American boys and girls are sent to “Hell,” for one year. If they survive that year they get to go home. And a significant number of those boys and girls became addicted, and took their addiction home, where many became dealers to sustain the habit … and an “infection” began.

This was part of the warm-up for Watergate.

But you see this wasn't the only “protected” drug flow. There were several, creating problems for the players.

There was a flow through Texas, that Jack Ruby was involved with. There was one working through Albania, remnants of a “Nazi” network. There was an old one run by the mercantilists, with cover from the State and Justice Department. There were the operations run by Angleton. There was the one run through the old “China hands.” There were Mafia flows: All of these separate operations were causing problems, they were creating separate power centers.

Drug trafficking, gathers intelligence and money, which are always a nice commodity to have in one's corner. And with all these separate operations, hidden from each other by need-to-know and other spook and smuggler tricks, they kept on stepping on each others toes. Plus you had new people trying to get into the game.

Where did Nixon get his slush funds? What was all that about Mexican money laundering? From “Watergate to Whitewater Thrillride,” written by the late Daniel Hopsicker:

When the hush money finally gets paid to the arrested Cubans, it comes in the form of Mexican checks, turned over first to Maurice Stans of the CREEP, who transferred them in turn to Watergate burglar Gordon Liddy. Liddy then passed them on to Bernard Barker, one of the Miami station Cubans arrested on the night of the final Watergate break- in. Barker was actually carrying some of this "Mexican" cash left over from these checks when he was apprehended.

The money for the Plumbers had come from one of George Bush's intimates, and at the request of Bush, a member of the Nixon Cabinet from February, 1971 on. Just two days before a new law was scheduled to begin making anonymous donations illegal, $700,000 in cash, checks, and securities had been loaded into a briefcase at Pennzoil headquarters [a building formerly known as the Zapata Building] and picked up by a company vice president, who boarded a Washington- bound Pennzoil jet and delivered the funds to the Committee to Re-Elect the President at ten o'clock that night.

"A Suggestion From America’s Last Honest Man"

The U.S. House of Representatives Banking and Currency Committee, chaired by Texas Democrat Wright Patman, soon began a vigorous investigation of the money financing the break-in, large amounts of which were found as cash in the pockets of the burglars. The largest amount had gone into the Miami bank account of Watergate burglar Bernard Barker, a CIA operative since the Bay of Pigs invasion, $100,000 that had been sent in by Texas CREEP chairman William Liedtke, longtime business partner of George Bush.

On the day Nixon resigned the Presidency, Patman wrote to Peter Rodino, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, asking him not to stop investigating Watergate. Though Patman died in 1976, his advice still holds good…but we won't hold our breath.

 

How much did George Bush himself know about the activities of the Plumbers, and when did he know it? George Bush? In 1972? Egad! But, apparently, Bush was knee-deep in things, as illustrated by the notorious White House meeting of June 23, 1972, whose exchange between Nixon and Haldeman--even without taking into consideration the unexplained 18-and-a-half minute gap in the same conversation-- provided the coup de grace to the agony of the Nixon regime. 

 

Haldeman says (on the tapes): "Now, on the investigation, you know the Democratic break-in thing, we're back in the problem area because the FBI is not under control, because [FBI chief] Gray doesn't exactly know how to control it and they have --their investigation is leading into some productive areas because they've been able to trace the money--not through the money itself--but through the bank sources--the banker. And, and it goes in some directions we don't want it to go."

 

To which Nixon's famous answer is, "When you get in-- when you get in (unintelligible) people, say, "Look, the problem is that this tracks back to the Bay of Pigs, the whole problem is that this will open the whole, the whole Bay of Pigs thing and the President just feels that ah, without going into the details--don't, don't lie to them to the extent to say there is no involvement, but just say this is a comedy of errors, without getting into it, the President believes that it is going to open the whole Bay of Pigs thing up again and, ah…they should call the FBI in and (unintelligible) don't go any further into this case period!

 

Based on Haldeman's later testimony, that Nixon's references to Howard Hunt and the Bay of Pigs are an oblique allusion to the Kennedy assassination, it seems that perhaps Mr. Nixon may have known more about the killing of Jack Kennedy than he was ever held accountable for--doubtlessly placing him in company with scores of others.

There then comes the one historical moment which, more than any other, delineates the character of George Bush. The scene was the Nixon White House during the final days of the Watergate debacle. White House officials, including George Bush, had spent the morning of that Monday, August 5, 1974, absorbing the impact of Nixon's notorious ``smoking gun'' tape, the recorded conversation between Nixon and his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, shortly after the original Watergate break-in, which could now no longer be withheld from the public. In that exchange of June 23, 1972, Nixon ordered that the CIA stop the FBI from further investigating how various sums of money found their way from Texas and Minnesota via Mexico City to the coffers of the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP) and thence into the pockets of the “Plumbers” arrested in the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate building.

These revelations were widely interpreted as establishing a prima facie case of obstruction of justice against Nixon. That was fine with George, who sincerely wanted his patron and benefactor Nixon to resign. George's great concern was that the smoking gun tape called attention to a money-laundering mechanism which he, together with Bill Liedtke of Pennzoil, and Robert Mosbacher, had helped to set up.

When Nixon, in the “smoking gun” tape, talked about “the Texans” and “some Texas people,” Bush, Liedtke, and Mosbacher were to whom he was referring... The threat to George's political ambitions was great. The White House that morning was gripped by panic. Nixon would be gone before the end of the week. In the midst of the furor, White House Congressional liaison William Timmons wanted to know if everyone who needed to be informed had been briefed about the smoking gun transcript.

In a roomful of officials, some of whom were already sipping Scotch to steady their nerves, Timmons asked Dean Burch, ``Dean, does Bush know about the transcript yet?”

“Yes,” responded Burch. “Well, what did he do?” inquired Timmons. “He broke out into assholes and shit himself to death,” replied Burch.Why would Bush do that? Break out into assholes and shit himself to death? Could Barry Seal's arrest on explosives charges on July 2, 1972, have had something to do with the operations of Bush's Republican Texas money-raising squad of Hugh Liedtke, Pennzoil, and Robert Mosbacher?

Richard Nixon: Drug Kingpin?

Why not? Is anyone still so naive as to believe that the notorious practice of covert operatives "looking the other way" when drug trafficking is afoot began during the Contra Cocaine 80’s? Later in our story, we will even hear some persuasive evidence that Nixon’s buddy Bebe Rebozo had been the "money man" behind top Medellin cartel drug kingpin (and Barry Seal associate) Carlos Lehder.

According to "The Great Heroin Coup," Nixon's antidrug campaign was in reality a bid to establish his own intelligence network. Egil Krogh wanted the White House, instead of the CIA, handling the drug intelligence work, allowing Nixon's staff to decide which drug traffickers to pursue. So they reorganized.

When Howard Hunt told Krogh he could enlist for the office experienced CIA figures, starting with CIA veteran Lucien Conein at its head, it was a ballsy move, since the CIA had just been acutely embarrassed by the discovery that a huge proportion of the smugglers arrested in the big Justice Department Operation Eagle drug bust in 1970 were Cubans, and Bay of Pigs veterans to boot.

When Nixon chose William Sullivan instead, who had once been second to J. Edgar Hoover in the FBI, "the boys down at the Masonic Lodge," as we’ve heard them referred to, could not have been overjoyed. Clearly, the White House was out to gain control of narcotics intelligence at home and abroad. But even that wasn't enough. Nixon's staff also sought to control enforcement itself, and that required effective strike forces.

So in January of 1972 the White House set up the Office For Drug Abuse Law Enforcement (ODALE), according to a plan conceived by Gordon Liddy. Nixon named the soon-to-resign-in-disgrace Myles Ambrose to head of the newly created Drug Enforcement Office, which later became the Drug Enforcement Administration.

There is much more in the article, such as one particular Mexican drug run/cash flow that was rudely interrupted until Nixon was out of office. The full article was once found online. The story and more are also in Hopsicker's book, Barry and "the Boys," The CIA, the Mob and America's Secret History.

And what was Nixon really doing in 1964 out in a Vietnam jungle with a box of gold that was so heavy it took three people to carry?

Watergate is much more than a “third-rate burglary”:  at its core, it's all about endgame.